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'Momma bear wants to protect': Vicarious parenting in practitioners working with disturbed and traumatised children.

Practitioners working with disturbed and neglected children and young people face many practical and personal challenges, including countertransference and secondary trauma reactions. One underexplored area is the practitioner requirement to negotiate with children's parents and to process feelings...

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Published in:Counselling & Psychotherapy Research Vol. 20; no. 4; pp. 680 - 689
Main Authors: Fixsen, Alison, Ridge, Damien, Evans, Carys
Format: research tables/charts Journal Article
Published: Wiley-Blackwell Dec2020
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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      jtl: Counselling & Psychotherapy Research
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      dt: Dec2020
      vid: 20
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      pub: Wiley-Blackwell
      place: Malden, Massachusetts
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        10.1002/capr.12285
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        atl: 'Momma bear wants to protect': Vicarious parenting in practitioners working with disturbed and traumatised children.
      aug:
        au:
          Fixsen, Alison
          Ridge, Damien
          Evans, Carys
        affil: University of Westminster, London, UK
      sug:
        subj:
          Parenting
          Counselors
          Psychologists
          Attitude of Health Personnel
          Mental Health Services In Infancy and Childhood
          Mental Health Services In Adulthood
          Trauma In Infancy and Childhood
          United Kingdom
          Adult
          Child
          Thematic Analysis
          Mental Health
          Pediatric Care
          Parental Attitudes
          Human
          Adult: 19-44 years
          Child: 6-12 years
      ab: Practitioners working with disturbed and neglected children and young people face many practical and personal challenges, including countertransference and secondary trauma reactions. One underexplored area is the practitioner requirement to negotiate with children's parents and to process feelings towards both parents and children. We explore the experiences of female counsellors and psychologists working with children and young adults in the UK mental health care sector, using an inductive thematic analysis. While participants spoke positively about their vocation and satisfaction gained from acting as an agent of change in young people's lives, they also related highly intense emotional work and traumatic accounts, using powerful metaphors to convey the impact of hearing and processing stories, indicating vicarious trauma effects and a strong parental invocation in therapists, including maternal feelings towards some children ('vicarious parenting'). Some parents were cast as potentially harming a child and obstructing the professional's work. Our paper fleshes out vicarious parenting as a particular form of countertransference.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype:
        research
        tables/charts
        Journal Article
      ougenre: Article
    language: English
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